issue no. 06 NOV 2013 ART . CULTURE . ANTIQUITIES . NATURAL HISTORY SYDNEY CONTENTS UNIVERSITY MUSEUMS O1 OUR SECOND NATURE: 18 THE LEGO ACROPOLIS Comprising the Macleay Museum, Nicholson Museum JEFFREY SMART’S OEUVRE 20 USU ART EXHIBITION: BEING. and University Art Gallery 05 PACIFIC SOLUTIONS 22 ZORA’S UNLIKELY INSPIRATION Open Monday to Friday, 10am to 4.30pm and the first Saturday of 08 INTO THE LIGHT: THE ORIGIN 24 SONIA KURARRA every month 12 to 4pm OF AN ANCIENT MODEL Closed on public holidays. 26 TOM BASS’S THE STUDENT General admission is free. 10 NOSTALGIA: AN AUSTRALIAN AND OTHER SCULPTURES Become a fan on Facebook and AESTHETIC follow us on Twitter. 28 OUT AND ABOUT 13 PRECISION (SLIDE) RULES! Sydney University Museums 30 WHAT’S ON Administration 14 TWEETING FOR T +61 2 9351 2274 32 OUR MERCHANDISE AT F +61 2 9351 2881 #COLLECTIONFISHING E [email protected] THE MUSEUM SHOP 16 TREASURE AMIDST THE DUST Education and Public Programs To book a school excursion, an 17 LEGO AND MUSEUMS: adult education tour or a University GREAT COMPANIONS heritage tour T +61 2 9351 8746 E [email protected] MACLEAY MUSEUM Macleay Building, Gosper Lane (off Science Road) T +61 2 9036 5253 F +61 2 9351 5646 E [email protected] CELEBRATING NICHOLSON MUSEUM In the southern entrance to 10 YEARS OF the Quadrangle T +61 2 9351 2812 OUR MAGAZINE F +61 2 9351 7305 A WORD FROM THE DIRECTOR E [email protected] UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY It is hard to believe a decade has passed War Memorial Arch, the Quadrangle since the first issue of a joint newsletter T +61 2 9351 6883 unifying collections and programs of the F +61 2 9351 7785 University’s Macleay Museum, Nicholson E [email protected] Museum and University Art Gallery. MUSE edited by Michael Turner. Since 2007, Michael Turner, senior Produced by Marketing and Communications, the University of curator of the Nicholson Museum has Sydney, November 2013. been editor, first of the smaller Sydney University Museums News and, from 13/3372 ISSN 1449‑0420 March 2012, MUSE. ABN 15 211 513 464 A new exhibition at the Macleay Museum CRICOS 00026A I would like to extend my appreciation features a selection of items not normally to Michael for taking on this role and associated with museum collections: performing it with flair and passion. My souvenirs. Curated by Associate Professor Cover image: Jeffrey Smart, The Plastic thanks also to the University’s Marketing Tube 1980, detail, private collection, Richard White, Touring the Past: tourism and Communications team who make courtesy Sally Dan‑Cuthbert Art Consultant,87t 3kg and history in Australia poses the question © Estate of Dr Jeffrey Smart AO every issue shine, and to our numerous CO2-e CO2-e ‘How did the Australian past become an David Ellis photograph: Martin Ho contributors who continue to surprise Saved Saved object of the tourist gaze?’ OUR SECOND NATURE us with fascinating stories on our collections and programs. One souvenir in particular caught my eye; a small jug (see page 30), on loan from a private In November, the University Art Gallery collection, and made in 1925 by Tasmanian will host a special exhibition on the 2.9t 2.2t 3kgIn an unfamiliar role as guest curator, the eminent writer potter Violet Mace. It’s not the jug itself that is work of Jeffrey Smart, who passed CO2-e CO2-e CO2-e intriguing; rather its decorations. Mace chose David Malouf reveals an intimate knowledge of Jeffrey away earlier this year. Guest curator Saved Saved Saved to use the imagery from Governor Arthur’s and distinguished author David Malouf Smart’s oeuvre. His exhibition of rarely‑seen works will proclamation boards produced around 1830 presents a personal view of Smart’s and posted on trees to convince Tasmanian open at the University Art Gallery in November 2013 work, titled Jeffrey Smart 1921-2013: Aboriginal people that they and Europeans Recondita Armonia – Strange Harmonies This publication is printed on environmentally and run to 7 March 2014. were equal before British law. A curious responsible paper, using vegetable-based inks, of Contrast. Drawing from our collection by SOS Print and Media, an FSC Chain of Custody memento indeed. certified printer. and rarely‑seen works from private Printed on ENVI Recycled 50/50 by Spicers, Image (above): Jeffrey Smart: Night Stop, Bombay 1981, holdings, the exhibition will explore how DAVID ELLIS which is NCOS certified. This is a PEFC-certified paper, containing 50 percent recycled fibre, made private collection Sydney, courtesy Philip Bacon Galleries Smart transformed objects from urban DIRECTOR, MUSEUMS AND CULTURAL from elemental and process chlorine free pulp derived from sustainably managed forests and landscapes into visual poetry. ENGAGEMENT non -controversial sources. ENVI Recycled 50/50 is Certified Carbon Neutral and Australian Paper is an ISO 14001 certified mill. ISSUE 06 NOVEMBER 2013 1 Right: Jeffrey Smart, The Plastic Tube 1980, private collection, courtesy Sally Dan‑Cuthbert Art Consultant Below left: Jeffrey Smart, Cape Dombey 1947, donated through the Alan Richard Renshaw bequest 1976, University Art Collection Below right: Jeffrey Smart, Vacant Allotment, Woolloomooloo 1947, gift of Chandler Coventry 1979, New England Regional Art Museum Jeffrey Smart is a supremely self‑conscious artist. His output is Cape Dombey and Vacant Allotment, Woolloomooloo (both Vacant Allotment stands out as an early masterpiece, but of by comparison small – he regularly destroyed paintings he felt 1947) already present us with elements of the visual language a ‘painterly’ career that Smart chose not to pursue. When he were not up to the mark; as late as 1996 he speaks of himself as that would occupy him over the whole of his painting life. moved to Sydney in 1952, after two years overseas in which “a painter who feels the constraints caused by lack of ability”. The obelisk in the first reappears 20 years later, as we see he studied briefly in Paris and made his first overwhelming None of this is unusual. Like most artists he makes choices that here, in The Steps (1968/69) and in many other pictures. discovery of Italy, he gave up painting for a time while he take account, in a clear‑headed self‑critical way, of his strengths, The windowless square tower of Vacant Allotment and its reassessed what sort of painter he might be. When he came which are also of course his weaknesses. This exhibition, within glowing rectangular fences form part of Smart’s repertoire back to it in the middle 1950s, he abandoned the palette knife its modest limits, attempts to track those choices. Centering of geometrical forms – cubes, squares, rectangles, circles and what he calls rather dismissively “the swirling, loaded on what seems to me to be Smart’s richest and most inventive and part‑circles, curves, quadrants and ellipses – for the next brush”, for something cooler and more detached. period, 1967–87, the exhibition is book‑ended with two paintings six decades. As early as Cahill Expressway (1962, collection National Gallery from 1947 when he was in his mid‑20s, and Labyrinth (2011), of Victoria), Smart discovered the poetry of highways, perhaps his last painting, which he embarked upon at age 90, in full from what he had seen the beginnings of in Italy in the early knowledge that it was to be his last. ’50s. But it was when he settled in Italy in the following year that the landscape of passage and destination emerged as a preoccupation that would make the world Smart worked in uniquely his own. The Italian autostrada system constitutes an enclosed, nationwide phenomenon from which Italians, with their flair for visual drama and their highly developed social sense, have created a complete world, with its own culture of monumental forms and its own coherent mythology and language: so much part of the contemporary Italian scene that they simply take it as given. Above left: Jeffrey Smart, The Red Jeffrey Smart, with an outsider’s eye for the particular, Arrow I 1972, private collection the exotic, reads it metaphysically: in flyovers, bridges, the Above right: Jeffrey Smart, The Argument, Prenestina 1982, private baroque curve of entrances and exits; in glimpses from collection Sydney, courtesy Philip far off and in passing, towers of wrecked cars, piles of Bacon Galleries brightly coloured oil‑barrels, stacked containers, abandoned farmhouses; in men in overalls at maintenance work and prostitutes waiting for truck‑drivers at turn‑offs. 2 ISSUE 06 NOVEMBER 2013 3 PACIFIC SOLUTIONS Rebecca Conway investigates one of the earliest ‘Pacific solutions’: the coerced (and forced) relocation of Pacific Islander people to Australia to solve labour shortages in the late 19th century. It is estimated that by 1915 around 393,000 Pacific Navy ‑policed Pacific seas. Some Islanders did come Islanders had been enlisted into some form of colonial willingly and voluntarily, but informed consent, full disclosure contract labour. The absence of large proportions of the of employment conditions and contracts, especially in population, who were often employed far from their home multilingual and non‑literate areas, was problematic. islands and villages, had a major impact on social and Once in Australia, indentured Pacific Islander labourers cultural life. regularly faced conditions that amounted to little more than Shortage of labour was a major issue in the rapidly slavery. The work involved long, physically gruelling days developing Australian colonies. By the 1860s a Pacific in exchange for subsistence: food; water; basic clothing; solution to meet the labour demand was in full swing. Over accommodation; tobacco. A wage was ‘paid out’ and a 40‑year period, more than 60,000 people from the Islands return passage to the Pacific provided only at the end of were brought to Australia to work as indentured labourers.